The star who never toured overseas in his lifetime is doing well in his first non-North American venue. Elvis at 21, the Smithsonian touring exhibition featuring fifty-six images of a very young, very handsome, and very dynamic Elvis Presley, has been well received, and the show is impeccably staged at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. After touring over a dozen American museums, Elvis at 21 hopped a plane to Canberra, Australia, where the exhibition has made itself at home since December 6, 2013, and where it will remain until March 10, 2014.

“The King has settled in nicely at the NPG Australia, and legions of fans have come through the galleries to revisit Elvis through the lens of Alfred Wertheimer and the printing genius of American master printer David Adamson,” notes visiting exhibition co-curator Warren Perry. Perry, asked by the National Portrait Gallery to give a series of lectures during the run of Elvis at 21, is in Canberra from January 14 through January 30. He adds, “Though NPG Australia has been open but a few years, the staff brings to the table no small amount of skill and design expertise and the installation of Elvis at 21 truly holds the walls in this innovative institution. The exhibition really pops in the space here at NPG.”

The narrative of the Wertheimer photos with Elvis is shaped along the walls of three brightly lit, large galleries in which the primarily black and white palate receives the brighter exhibition didactic panels and monumental images. At the moment of the narrative when Elvis leaves New York for the return to Memphis, the designers chose to isolate several images in a black bay at the end of the galleries; the effect is quite dramatic.

The NPG Australia has also embraced the experience with a full schedule of programming and activities for adults and young people. A large breakout area across the interior museum plaza from the exhibition contains activities aimed at all audiences. A chess set with figures representing the Elvis experience—Elvis as king, Priscilla as queen, mini-Gracelands as rooks, blue suede shoes as pawns—draws parents and children to play while a table asking the visitor to describe his or her favorite Elvis experience beckons all to chronicle their memories of Elvis or memories of experiencing Elvis’ music, movies, or message. The museum is also hosting Elvis movie afternoons, quiz nights, Elvis related book groups, and original choreography and dance produced in artistic response to Elvis at 21.

As one of the most celebrated and prolific musical
icons of the 20th century, it’s hard to believe that Elvis Presley,
the King of Rock 'n' Roll, rarely traveled outside of the United States. Celebrities
are known to jet set, greeting their adoring fans as they bounce from country
to country, but Presley curiously remained stateside for much of his career. International
fans were undeniably disappointed, but their devotion to the King never
faltered, and now the wait is over. Elvis
at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimerwill
visit Australia in December 2013, offering an intimate glimpse into the life of
a young Elvis Presley during the year 1956.

Comprised of dozens of photographs that
capture beautifully the innocence and influence of the iconic superstar, the
exhibition presents a visual timeline of the musician at the onset of his
wildly successful career.

Now for a bit of background—

It wasn’t as though Presley had a penchant for
remaining in his home country. He performed five concerts in Canada and delivered a
surprise performance in Paris—albeit during his stint in the Army. He received
lucrative offers to appear in England, Germany, Japan, and Australia, teasing fans
with the prospect of a world tour, but declined at the behest of his manager,
Colonel Parker.

Parker, both intrepid and persistent, largely
influenced the musician’s personal and professional affairs. Refusing to apply
for a passport, Parker rejected international touring propositions, as he was
unable to accompany his client out of the country. His bizarre insistence to
keep Presley tethered to the U.S. sparked theories of a sordid past, and in 1981,
four years after Presley’s death, Parker’s identity was revealed. An immigrant
from Breda, Holland, Andreas Cornelis Van Kujik journeyed to the States at the age
of 20 and never applied for citizenship, confining him within the U.S. borders. Muddled
and mysterious, Parker’s life prior to arriving in the states remains unclear and
includes rumors of an accidental murder in Breda forcing him to flee. Driven by
self-preservation, Parker stifled Presley’s international opportunities and
restricted him to US-based appearances despite the musician’s roaring, global popularity.

Those close to Presley recall the performer always
regretting his lack of international travel. Now 36 years after his death, SITES
is excited to announce the King’s appearance Down Under later this year.

Guaranteed to excite fans of all ages, we are pleased
to share Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimerwith
you Australian fans who have so patiently waited for the King arrive. The exhibition will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, ACT, Australia, beginning in early December 2013.

"Before Elvis came along, Memphis was a cotton town and built on river commerce. Alongside and after Elvis, artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison gravitated toward Sun Studio. In the 1960s and '70s, Memphis’ response to Motown was Stax Studio, but even in the face of such powerhouse combinations like Isaac Hayes and David Porter, Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, and Sam Moore and Dave Prater (Sam and Dave), Elvis was [IS] still the most identifiable face in Memphis music.

The city reflects, in many places, the same culture of Southern food and slow living as it did in Elvis’ day. Restaurants like Barksdale’s on Cooper, Interstate BBQ on South Third Street, and Broadway Pizza on Broad Street represent the spirit of Memphis cooking at its finest and most fun. Elvis would be proud to see that Sun Studio on Union Avenue is alive and well; it's a small stop on the Memphis tour, but a necessary one. Also, Memphis’ downtown would be a surprise to Elvis; Beale Street doesn’t really begin to act up until ten or so at night—of course, that would jive well with Elvis’ waking and sleeping habits."

Sure, the Midwest boasts more than 30% of America's cropland, lakes and rivers galore, lots of cheese, and another Men's Final Four basketball title, but until now, it has been void of one very important thing--"Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer."

If you're not already a fan of the national traveling exhibition, it covers just one pivotal year in Elvis' life, the year 1956, right smack-dab in the middle of a decade that introduced social and political unrest into an otherwise complacent country.

Perhaps at the opposite ends of social spectrum were Elvis and Dwight D. Eisenhower, one a symbol of radicalism and the other of the establishment. How did the president feel about Elvis? According to the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Pennsylvania" . . . the First Lady was very tolerant of Elvis, his pelvis, and rock n' roll. The President, however, approved of neither. In fact, he refused to let his grandkids play Elvis records within range of his hearing. According to his grandson David, the President was shocked to discover that his two favorite songs, O Sol Mio and Army Blue, had been redone by Elvis and renamed It's Now or Never and Love Me Tender."

Eisenhower evidently warmed to Elvis after the singer was drafted into the Army without complaining or pleading for special accomodations, but the two never met in real life.

Elvis was introduced to Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, but years later when Nixon was actually in the White House. Photographed together in December 1970, Nixon and Presley made for an odd pairing; nonetheless, a mutual respect existed between the parties. Nixon later wrote: "It was a pleasure to meet with you in my office recently, and I want you to know once again how much I appreciate your thoughtfulness . . ."

For more about Elvis and the year 1956, visit the traveling exhibition, now in Abilene, Kansas!

All along, I had a hunch that this inconspicuous corridor in the belly of the Science Museum of Virginia was my "Elvis hallway." But, it wasn't always so obvious. In 1983, several years after the museum opened, the west side of the building was totally renovated to accomodate a new planetarium and theater: overhanging ironwork was removed, doorways and windows were closed off or totally modified.

Matching up the features in the photo, like the intricate ironwork curving to the left side of the original image, the large industrial window, and those broad stone floor tiles was impossible. Other than Tom's intuition about the location of the photo, how could I prove that Elvis was right here?

The key was the east corridor, the passage that led to the "colored" part of the building. Now closed to the public, this area remains virtually the same as it did so many years ago. The bright windows are still there, as are the floor tiles, the doors, the overhead ironwork, and the exterior wall wrapping around the building. The train station is a mirror-image design, and this is exactly what the renovated area would have looked like in 1956.

I went back to the "Elvis hallway" and started matching up details that were faintly visible: There was still a window on the right side of the hallway, albeit smaller, but the scale was dead on. The wooden doors on the left were still there and seemed to provide an anchor for visualizing the 1956 image. Above those side doors, now covered by a large awning, I could see the outline of an old window, also in the original photo. The exit doors--in the center of Wertheimer's image--had been removed, but there was an opening that matched the projected size. This had to be it.

I snapped some photos of my own and took them back to my office. The only way to be sure that this was the right spot was to layer the original image with one of the modern corridor. Once I started deconstructing the contemporary hallway on my computer, I could see that "x" marked the spot, even the base moldings near the floor matched up with Wertheimer's photo. This was the place.

Finally, what about that water tower? Remember in the original photo there was a ghostly outline of tall shape in the upper right corner. Was the water tower still there? Looking out just to the west, the tower is, indeed, a proud fixture in the modern landscape--an emblem of Interbake Foods, a regional baking company that packaged its cookies in decorative tins under the trademark of “FFV”, short for “Famous Foods of Virginia”.

So, if you find yourself at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond, wandering down the hallway leading to the Imax theater, you're walking in Elvis' footsteps. Pause and look to the left as you walk beside the museum's gift shop. STOP. You're now standing in the exact spot that Alfred Wertheimer was in when he snapped that famous photo--the hips, the hair, the greatest rock-n-roll legend of our age.

So, Elvis had me running again. This time, I was off to Broad Street Station, once known as Union Station of Richmond, and now home to the Science Museum of Virginia. The word for this building is grand. With immense doric columns, a 105-foot-tall dome, and an broad oval lawn leading up to the structure, it commands respect.

Designed by New York architect John Russell Pope, Broad Street Station opened on January 6, 1919, and at the height of operations during World War II, the facility saw thousands of riders and more than 50 trains a day coming and going, up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Passengers--originating in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Providence, New York City, and everywhere else--were funneled down to D.C. and then to Richmond, the central hub for all points south.

So, how does Elvis fit into this picture of rail travel? If you're up on your "Elvis at 21" trivia, you'll know that the singer did a rehearsal for "The Steve Allen Show" in New York City on June 29, 1956 (the one with the tuxedo and hound dog). Al Wertheimer shot photos of the skits and then boarded a late-night train at Penn Station. Destination: Richmond, Virginia, where Elvis would perform two evening shows at The Mosque.

Elvis pulled into the train station the morning of June 30, 1956. The scene was a reflection of the times--men in fedoras, women in pumps, their hard, plastic suitcases resting on long mahogany benches in an elegant waiting area. Of course, that part of the building was for whites only. The east side of the station (now adjacent to the Department of Motor Vehicles) was for African American patrons and was considerablely less grand than the space adjacent to it.

As he walked up the concourse from the train platform, Elvis would have seen the hallway leading to the "colored" facilities and gotten a glimpse of the big, bustling lobby. But, he turned down a solitary corridor, looking for a cab to take him over to the the Jefferson Hotel, about two miles away. According to local historian Tom Driscoll (who not only knows everything about the train station but also used to hang out with his grandfather--a cabbie at Broad Street Station--back in the 1950s and '60s), the west corridor in the back of the building led out to the taxi stand. Could this have been the hallway where Wertheimer snapped the image?

Tom's stories piqued my interest and provided fodder for some forensic field work. Next stop: The "Elvis hallway."

If you read my first blog about Elvis in Virginia's capital city, you'll know that I was feeling a little lost, trying to determine where Elvis was when Alfred Wertheimer snapped the singer's photo in an unremarkable train station hallway on June 30, 1956.

This much I did know: There were two major stations in the area during that period, and one was Main Street Station. Now just a few feet away from the gravity-defying ramps of Interstate 95, this stunning Renaissance Revival building opened in 1901 and must have been the Grand Dame of the city. Even today, it's a remarkable structure with a commanding clock tower and Beaux Arts details that will knock your architectural socks off.

Needless to say, Main Street Station was a good place to start, especially since it was so close to Elvis' next destination that day--the Jefferson Hotel. I arranged a tour of the building with Diane Lillo and Viktoria Badger, who were both versed in the maintenance, history, and resurrection of Main Street Station.

After introductions, I opened my Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer book and said, "Recognize this hallway?" The book automatically fell to the spread of Elvis walking out the train station doors. (I've looked at the image so many times, the books seems to remember to take me there.)

Silence.

Neither woman could identify the corridor, or the set of doors, or the broad stone tiles on the floor. We flipped through stacks of archival images, glossy pictures of a golden age in rail travel, and older sepia-toned photos that showed horse-drawn carriages waiting for passengers under the elevated train tracks. No connections. What did seem clear was that the photo wasn't taken in the main lobby or any of the other rooms that made up the public quarter of the station.

We needed to search out that hallway on foot. Diane and Viktoria took me back to a set of locked doors. (This is where things always get interesting, right?) With the clanking of chains and keys, the door opened to a massive train shed--the place where passengers would have boarded trains to Anywhere, U.S.A. Divided hallways and new interior walls made this a labyrinth of modern reuse and one that would difficult to de-construct to its former self. Still, I wanted to look into all the possibilities.

And, there was the water tower. In the original 1956 image, there is a very faint outline of a tower above the right door. Could we locate that landmark and thereby determine the location of the hallway? It just so happens that there is a water tower outside the station, in an area of the city called Church Hill; it's clearly visible from the east side of the building. We kept walking. Finally, there was a set of doors. They were dull and metal, instead of wood; they were wider too, with four sets of doors and two glass side lights, but there was a vague similarity. The true badge would be that water tower. Viktoria unlocked the doors, and there it was--in nearly the same spot as it appeared in the original photo.

What about the other clues: The ironwork above the doors, the waist-high wall that turned in front of Elvis, where were they?

We had exhausted our possibilities in the station. This had to be it, but I wasn't feeling overly confident. I returned to main part of the station and was quickly introduced to one more person, as Viktoria summed up the picture puzzle I was trying to solve.

"Oh, no," the newcomer said matter-of-factly. "That's not taken here. That's at Broad Street Station."

For many fans, Elvis is omnipresent. They see his face, hear his music, feel his presence wherever they go. For us, Elvis is in Richmond, Virginia, or at least he will be. Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer will be making a stop at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on December 24, 2011. It's bit like a homecoming, really, since several of the 56 photos in the traveling exhibition were taken in the city.

I jumped at the opportunity to dig into the details of the Richmond pictures, a series that intimately chronicles a mere 24 hours in Elvis' young life.

The photo from that group that most intrigued me was one of Presley walking--sauntering--out of a local train station on a mid-summer day. It appears, on the surface, to be a serene photo. Elvis is the only person in the frame. The shadows and ripples on Elvis' stylish jacket accentuate the curve of his hips--those famous hips. It's just a single figure in motion with perfect light pouring in from every direction.

Of course, there's a story behind the image that contradicts the quiet. "Very early on the morning of June 30th, I arrived at the train station in Richmond," the photographer Alfred Wertheimer recalls. "A short while later, the train pulled in . . . Junior Smith was walking off the train with Elvis. Elvis took a look around, smiled, and turned on his little radio. It wasn't one of those huge boom boxes you'd see thirty years later, but an RCA Transistor 7 portable radio that had been given to him as a present . . . The next thing I saw was Elvis exiting the train station with his radio blaring."

I read that passage repeatedly. Each time, it was like adding a background score to a silent film. I could hear beats bouncing off the cold stone walls, mingled with the moderate pace of Elvis' footsteps, the photographer stepping hard to keep up just behind him.

I wanted to walk down that hallway with Elvis, to see what he may have seen, some 55 years ago. So, I set out to find this memorable corridor that Wertheimer's June 30, 1956, photograph had imprinted on my mind.

The scene was shot in Richmond, Virginia. How hard could it be to find the location? There are parts of this centuries-old capital city that look as they did 50, 75, even 100 years ago. I figured I had a fair chance of catching up with Elvis, but I had to know where to look first.

Clue #1: Richmond train station. Problem #1: Which one? For locals, it may have been a no brainer, but for a semi-outsider, it was a bit like looking for your car in a crammed holiday parking lot.

As you may know, the Smithsonian maintains a Facebook page that goes hand-in-hand with the traveling exhibition Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer. The crowd that follows the page is as passionate as they are insightful, and their responses to our questions are sometimes worthy of sharing with a larger audience. Check out one articulate fan's response to our question "What makes Alfred Wertheimer's 1956 photos of Elvis Presley so compelling to you?"

"I have asked for a time machine, and no one has invented one yet . . . in fact, the need to travel time came up in another FB [Facebook] group discussion today, and that conversation was also in connection to loved ones who are not here any longer . . . bizarre, it's one of those days. Point is, to me these photos are time travel. Travel to 1956, a point in time where Elvis was crossing an invisible line, a line once crossed, he could never go back over. You can see it and sense this shift in the photos, an unseen force, like changes in the atmosphere, a hurricane was developing. [In] the photo . . . posted yesterday, look how short the line is to meet Elvis, but there is a line and the ladies are sure as heck not there waiting for a train:).The 'atmosphere' changed forever and everywhere, and in 1956, it was captured by Mr. [Wertheimer], thank you.

All the people around E. [Elvis] were clueless at the time as to [his] long-term magnitude. And even though E. had himself said he knew 'something' was going to happen to him, I think E. is most clueless of all at this point in time, also captured. What if E. had never crossed the line, unimaginable . . . but if not, then I would be posting elsewhere . . . and listening to Jim Morrison right now, in a 1970 live performance, singing Mystery Train. This is as close as we come to time travel, for now, and if or when that happens, which people would you bring back with you?"

--Rita Stokes, Elvis at 21 Facebook fan

THANKS, Rita! Keep those great comments coming! For more great responses to this question, visit our Facebook page, and follow Elvis on Twitter too! Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer was developed collaboratively by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and Govinda Gallery, and is sponsored by HISTORY™.

If you follow Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimeron our Facebook or Twitter pages, you'll no doubt be aware that the popular traveling exhibition is currently at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas. It's an appropriate pairing--president and icon. Of course, Bill Clinton was only ten years old when Elvis Presley burst onto the national musical scene in 1956, but it was a grand entrance that Clinton would never forget. In his 2004 autobiography, My Life: Bill Clinton, the author cites his early affinity for Elvis: "I loved Elvis. I could sing all his songs, as well as the Joranaires' backgrounds," he recounts. "We watched his legendary performance on The Ed Sullivan Showtogether and laughed when the cameras cut off his lower body movements to protect us from the indecency. Beyond his music, I identified with his small-town roots. And I thought he had a good heart."

Decades later, after Clinton became president, he amassed a substantial collection of Elvis-related swag, some of which will be view at the Clinton Library, in conjunction with the large-scale photographs that make up the traveling exhibit.

If you want to get a true insider's view of both Elvis and Clinton's fascination with him, be sure to make a stop in Little Rock before August 21, 2011, when the Smithsonian's exhibition jets off to its next setting, the Mobile Museum of Art in Arkansas.